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Weekly News Digest
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August 18, 2015 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today.
CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.
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Innovative Launches Next Round of Sierra APIs
Innovative rolled out the second set of REST APIs for its Sierra Services Platform. These APIs give libraries and commercial partners the ability to access Sierra data and metadata so they can create applications for their patrons and staffers. The second set provides transactional APIs for managing holds and patron accounts, as well as expanded access to branch information and authority records.Customers with the Sierra 2.0 Service Pack 2 can request access to the new set of APIs. The set will be bundled with the Sierra 2.0 Service Pack 3 at no extra cost beginning in 3Q 2015. For more information, read the press release.
LexisNexis Introduces Survey Results on Law Firm Expectations
LexisNexis Legal & Professional released a white paper, “Hiring Partners Reveal New Attorney Readiness for Real World Practice,” which highlighted a significant gap between law firms’ expectations for job candidates and the skills law students actually have in the areas of legal research, litigation, and transactional practice.“[The] survey results provide law schools with an opportunity to directly address the gap through their curricula and help set their graduates apart as they enter real world practice. It also highlights where law firms can supplement their training programs or adjust their entry-level hiring decisions,” says Paul Speca, VP of the law school market at LexisNexis. For more information, read the press release.
Science Journal Gains Support From the Royal Society of Chemistry
The Royal Society of Chemistry agreed to collaborate with Royal Society Publishing on its Royal Society Open Science open access (OA) journal. The organization will manage the commissioning and peer review processes for the journal’s chemistry section (one of its 12 subject sections). Covering research across all science disciplines, the journal features objective peer review, open data (authors must make all of their supporting data freely available), and article-level metrics.For more information, read the press release.
LexisNexis Adds Proofreading Solution to Lexis for Microsoft Office
LexisNexis Legal & Professional updated its Lexis for Microsoft Office legal drafting and review tool with the EagleEye agreement-checking solution. Users can access it directly when they are working on documents in Word and Outlook to make their drafts more precise (by eliminating content discrepancies and incompleteness) and to minimize proofreading time.The integration of EagleEye was made possible by LexisNexis’ alliance with Microsystems, a provider of document technology solutions. For more information, read the press release.
Kudos Signs Agreements to Incorporate Recommendations, Summaries, and Altmetrics
Kudos partnered with TrendMD and Research Media, and renewed its partnership with Altmetric.TrendMD, a content recommendation engine for scholarly publishers, integrated with Kudos’ publication pages to add “You might also like …” links to related materials, regardless of whether they are inside the Kudos network. Publishers and researchers can promote their publications using affiliate links. Research Media is piloting a service with Kudos that helps publishers sponsor the creation of verbal and visual summaries for publications. This service could help non-native English speakers and authors whose publications are already popular. Altmetric renewed its agreement with Kudos to make altmetrics data more visible and to provide high-level summaries of a publication’s altmetric performance. Users can then view additional details on Altmetric’s website. For more information, read the blog post.
Alexander Street Press Introduces Platform Redesign
Alexander Street Press redesigned its video, audio, and text-distribution platform to make it more user-friendly and visually appealing. Users can access the new platform with a free 30-day trial.According to the press release, new features include the following: - More intuitive search, browse, video, and audio pages to help patrons find content faster
- Easily accessible instructional videos to get patrons up and running and increase usage
- More prominent related items to provide additional, relevant content to patrons
- Alternative screen layouts to improve the viewing experience
- A more mobile-friendly and responsive design, for easy viewing on any device or screen resolution
For more information, read the press release.
Pew Research Center Releases Mobile Messaging Report
The newest Pew Research Center Internet, Science & Tech division report, “Mobile Messaging and Social Media 2015,” is based on Pew’s first survey to classify the use of messaging apps as a different mobile activity from texting. The survey found that 36% of smartphone owners use messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Kik, or iMessage, and 17% use automatic-deletion apps such as Snapchat or Wickr. Nearly half of smartphone owners age 18–29 use these types of apps.For more information, read the summary.
Blackboard Joins Forces With Moodle Provider
Blackboard acquired Level Seven, a Latin American Moodle provider, allowing both companies to offer more services and solutions that leverage the Moodle learning management system (LMS). Level Seven provides learning solutions, hosting, support, and consulting services. It has 200-plus customers in countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela. In the past few months, Blackboard has had significant growth in these countries.For more information, read the press release.
Summit on Worker Voice Will Take Cues From the Labor Movement
The White House announced the Summit on Worker Voice for Oct. 7, 2015, which will “explore ways to ensure that working Americans are fully sharing in the benefits of the broad-based economic growth that they are helping to create,” according to the press release. The focus will be on how people can speak out about their jobs to impact both workers and businesses positively, as well as strengthen the middle class. The White House will release more details in the near future.For more information, read the press release.
Readex Streamlines Collection Interfaces
Readex launched new interfaces for several of its collections—America’s Historical Imprints, America’s Historical Newspapers, and the World Newspaper Archive—in response to feedback from users such as librarians, professors, researchers, and college students.The enhancements include interfaces with streamlined designs, intuitive navigation that features a prominent search box and larger tabs, and improved image magnification. For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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